Benedict’s Law: Is Your School Ready for the New Allergy Training Requirements Coming This September?

The Story Behind the Law

In December 2021, five-year-old Benedict Blythe died from anaphylaxis at his school in Stamford, Lincolnshire. He had a known allergy to cow’s milk protein, but on that day he was mistakenly given milk. An inquest later revealed a devastating catalogue of failures: staff were not equipped to recognise his symptoms in time, and the medication that could have saved his life was not administered quickly enough. His family described it as entirely preventable.

What followed was one of the most significant child safety campaigns this country has seen in recent years. Benedict’s parents established the Benedict Blythe Foundation and, alongside clinicians, allergy charities and policymakers, campaigned tirelessly for change. The result is Benedict’s Law, which is a landmark piece of legislation that will transform how schools across England manage life-threatening allergies.

His mother, Helen Blythe, put it simply: “We don’t want any other families to go through what we’ve been through.”

What the Government Has Now Confirmed

In March 2026, the Department for Education announced new mandatory statutory guidance coming into force in September 2026. These are not optional recommendations, schools will be legally required to comply. The three core requirements are:

• Mandatory allergy awareness training for all staff — every teacher, support assistant, lunchtime supervisor, and member of non-teaching staff must understand how to recognise anaphylaxis, how to respond in an emergency, and how to administer adrenaline auto-injectors.
• Spare adrenaline auto-injectors (AAIs/EpiPens) on site — for the first time, schools must stock emergency AAIs that can be used even when a child has not previously been diagnosed with an allergy. Reactions can and do occur without warning.
• A comprehensive whole-school allergy and medical conditions policy — including individual Healthcare Plans for pupils with known allergies, clear incident recording processes, and a documented approach to allergy management across all areas of school life.

The scale of need is stark. According to the Department for Education, 500,000 days of learning were lost last year alone due to allergy-related illness or medical appointments. Around 680,000 children in England are currently living with food allergies. Yet before this legislation, research showed that 70% of schools lacked even the most basic allergy safeguards.

Important: These requirements apply to all maintained schools, academies, and independent schools in England. Maintained nurseries attached to schools are also covered. From September 2026, Ofsted is expected to pay greater attention to how schools are managing allergy safety — meaning this is not only a moral obligation but a compliance one too.

What This Means in Practice for Your School

The DfE has been clear that allergy training should not be approached in the same way as traditional first aid, where one or two named staff hold a certificate and everyone else relies on them. Instead, it should be embedded across the whole school, like fire safety awareness: everyone knows the risks, everyone knows how to respond.

This means your reception staff, your PE teachers, your caretaker, your lunchtime supervisors, all of them need basic allergy awareness and the confidence to act. A reaction can happen anywhere: in a corridor, on the playing field, in the canteen. Staff closest to a child in crisis may not be the designated first aider.

Annual training will also become mandatory, meaning this is not a one-time tick-box exercise but an ongoing commitment that needs to be built into your school’s training calendar.

How Midlands Training Company Can Help

At the Midlands Training Company, we have been delivering high-quality first aid and paediatric first aid training to schools, nurseries, and education settings across the Midlands for years. We understand the pressures schools face, tight budgets, difficulty releasing staff, the challenge of coordinating training around the school day, and we’ve designed our delivery model to work around you.

Our trainers are industry experts: early years professionals, healthcare practitioners, paramedics, and former teachers, all with genuine working knowledge of the settings they train in. We don’t send a generic trainer with a PowerPoint, we send someone who understands your environment.

We offer flexible training options to suit your school’s needs:

• On-site training at your school — we come to you, minimising disruption and keeping your staff on familiar ground. We can work around the school day, delivering to support staff during the day and teaching staff after hours where needed.
• Open courses throughout the Midlands 
• Blended learning — combining e-learning theory with in-person practical assessment, ideal for staff with irregular hours or shift patterns.
• Weekday and weekend availability — because we know that training often needs to happen outside of term-time or around the school’s operational needs.

Our Paediatric First Aid qualification is particularly well-suited to school settings and covers the recognition and emergency treatment of anaphylaxis, alongside CPR, choking, burns, fractures, and a wide range of other childhood medical emergencies. It is already an Ofsted requirement for early years settings and provides robust, practical confidence for anyone working with children.

For schools needing whole-staff awareness sessions, to meet the broad allergy training requirement for all staff, we can deliver bespoke in-house sessions tailored to your school community, including, where possible, assembly-style student workshops at no additional cost when delivered on the same day as your staff training.

Don’t Wait Until September

The September 2026 deadline may feel some way off, but the reality is that training providers across the Midlands and beyond are already becoming fully booked for summer and early autumn INSET days. Schools that delay risk running out of compliant options before the guidance comes into force.

Benedict’s Law is a legacy built on grief, love, and an extraordinary campaign by one family who refused to let their son’s death go without meaning. The least we can do — as educators, as training providers, as a community — is make sure every child in every school has the protection they deserve.

If you’re a school leader, business manager, or training coordinator in the Midlands, we’d love to help you get compliant, get confident, and get ready before September.

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